From Cumnock to Cumberland

By Elaine Corbett

Mary Smith, Still an Enigma.

My great grandmother Mary Smith was born from a union of two farming families; the Smiths of Whitehill, Ochiltree, and the Osbornes of Killoch. Her parents were farming at Drongan House when Mary, then her brother Robert were born. When Mary was five, her father died suddenly and the little family moved to Kilmarnock where their mother rented out rooms to her brother, Matthew Mair Osborne - later to become the editor and owner of the Kilmarnock Standard.  

When Mary was eleven years old tragedy struck when her mother died leaving the two orphaned children in the care of their aunt Agnes Osborne, now married to farm overseer Robert Wallace of Piperhill. They brought them to Townhead of Drumley, near Mauchline.

All seemed normal until my story really begins. In 1896 Mary, aged twenty and unmarried, stepped off the train in Keswick, and went to a boarding house to give birth to my grandfather, Robert Smith.

 She had him adopted by a family in Workington, a thriving port on the west coast rich from mineral mining. The man of the house was a coal miner. A year later, she placed her second child, Victor James, with the same family.

With her third child, she found that her lodging house in Keswick had closed, and her landlady/midwife had retired to Toxteth in Lancashire so she was forced to make other arrangements, finding a family in Cockermouth to adopt little Kenneth.

Child number four was left with the sister of Kenneth’s adoptive mother, Sarah Briscoe. This lady was to be the saviour of all Mary’s children, for she made a home for all eight of them, apart from Kenneth who remained with her sister in Cockermouth. Mary had removed Robert and Victor from the care of the Workington family and placed them all together with Sarah. Far from an absentee parent, Mary visited often, bringing cheeses and money to pay for their upkeep. She would arrive in a buggy laden with goodies, and cash secreted in her petticoats to prevent thieves taking it on her journey. None of the children really knew where she came from, but they knew she was Scottish from her accent, and she spoke a lot about Islay, where her aunt and uncle had taken them to live when Robert Wallace found a new job overseeing farms on the Laggan estate. Islay would have been a rare and exotic place to those children, and it wasn’t until his eighties that my great uncle Fred made the journey to see Laggan Farm - the only one to do so - and greatly thrilled he was!

Life for the extended family Briscoe had its ups and downs. John Briscoe was a farmer when Sarah and he were married, and two of Mary’s children were born at their farm in Edderside. John then left farming and went to work at the steel works in Workington. That is when the children went to St Michael’s school where we researched their records. The school was overcrowded and conditions were poor, so poor in fact that my grandfather never did learn to read or write until he married at the age of twentyfour.

They finally settled back into farming in Lorton Vale and raised the children in healthy country air. Workington was heavily industrialised at the time and childhood diseases were commonplace.

But what of Mary?

Census records show her living with Robert and Agnes Wallace along with her brother. Robert and Agnes had no children of their own. Robert Smith was a bookeeper for the farms under Robert Wallace’s stewardship. Of course, there was no indication of who the father of the children was, or how keeping the secret of her pregnancies had been accomplished.

After the deaths of Robert Wallace, Agnes, and her brother Robert, Mary came back to Drongan as a housekeeper at Lane Farm and at the age of 56, married David Knox, finally moving to live with Smith relations in Twynholm after she was widowed. She died in 1947.

It wasn’t until I did a DNA test with Ancestry that the potential father - at least in my line of descent - became clear, when lots of DNA links to Wallaces popped up. So the question now arose, did she do this of her own volition?

 What we knew of her personality from what her children and grandchildren saw, she was a very self assured and confident character. It seems likely that she was hiding her relationship with Robert Wallace, but how they did that in a house of servants seems impossible. Whether aunt Agnes was accepting of that situation we can’t know, but when she died in Islay in 1918, the monument on her grave placed by Robert Wallace was flamboyant and expensive.

This is it, taken from the back. There is inlaid brass lettering ‘Wallace’ on the plinth, and a memorial inscribed in the column to Agnes. It is noteworthy to observe that the houses in the middle distance would not have been built at the time of her death (1918), and there would be a commanding view of the sound.

Her sons and daughter made their lives in Cumberland, with farming at the core, and Granny Briscoe lived out her life as a treasured matriarch, Mary never playing a role for them apart from an occasional mention of the enigma that was their mother. She never did tell them who their father was.