The Gilchrists of the East Neuk of Fife
Article by Alison Gilchrist
Discovering my Fife roots. It all started with a poster of our family tree, titled the ‘Gilchrists of East Neuk’, hand written by an anonymous relative and proudly shared with my generation of the family. The diagram listed various unknown individuals, including several Andrew Gilchrists, but intriguingly ending with me, my siblings and cousins on my father’s side. As a teenager, I relished my Scottish ancestry but this had faded over the years as I got on with a busy life ‘down south’ and it is only since retirement and moving to Cumbria that I have re-discovered my northern roots and found the time to explore the lives of our Fife forebears through visits to the area and records available through Ancestry, Fife Family History and the archives of the Kilrenny and Anstruther Burgh Collection. Although things start to get a little hazy back into the 18th century with the overlapping names making it difficult to find the ‘right’ individuals and connections, I discovered a complex family network of Gilchrists, Christies, Lindsays, Listers, Guthries and Greigs settled around the parish of Kilrenny, but drawn, mainly through marriage, from villages across the East Neuk and beyond. In the main they seem to come from farming stock, gradually becoming more prosperous, moving from agricultural labouring through some pioneering applications of science and technology using steam engines to replace horsepower, and increase productivity in the rich (and enriched) fields above Cellardyke and Anstruther.
A farming family
Gilchrists seem to have worked on farms in this area for several generations and many are buried in Kilrenny kirkyard. The first Andrew Gilchrist (1782-1823) I can reliably identify as my great-great-great grandfather lived with his wife, Agnes Christie and their young family at Butcher Hall on East Pitcorthie Farm. Andrew and Agnes were both born in Carnbee parish but otherwise very little is known about their lives. He started his working life as an agricultural day-labourer, and it seems Agnes worked alongside him as she is described in the 1851 census as an agricultural labourer, though at this point she is widowed and living in Pittenweem. They had two sons, another Andrew and John. Unfortunately (Pitcorthie) Andrew Gilchrist died in his forties, while his sons were still teenagers but they seem to have stayed at Butcher Hall.
Andrew Gilchrist of Carvenom
The second Andrew married Elspeth Lindsay in Crail on 28th November 1828 and she joined him to live at East Pitcorthie. They had four children altogether, including Penelope, closely followed in 1832 by twins Andrew and James (who died aged only eight), and later Betsy in 1843. According to the 1841 census they also appear to have taken in three small Nicolson children, possibly related to Margaret Nicolson who had become his brother’s much older wife. Perhaps they are the offspring of an earlier marriage but I haven’t been able to find out any more along this particular trail. Almost inevitably, the elder surviving son Andrew (1807-1884) followed his parents into farm labouring but he gradually rose up in the world. In 1849 this Andrew Gilchrist took on the tenancy at Milton Muir, Anstruther Wester, where he farmed for the next 30 years. He was evidently fairly successful, as the 1861 census record described him as a ‘farmer of 60 acres, employing two men, seven boys, nine women on the farm and living with two servants’. He was elected to serve on the Anstruther Wester Council in 1871 and their minutes report him offering his carts for various local initiatives including gravelling the roads between the town hall and the pier, as well as providing transport for social outings. Elspeth died in 1866, after which Andrew married for a second time in 1870, to the much younger Helen Taylor, who bore him a son, John, that same year. He gave up the lease at Milton Muir in his seventies in 1879, marking his retirement from farming by treating his “workpeople and a few friends numbering at about twenty, to an excellent supper”. With his new wife and young son John, he moved into the village of Anstruther Wester, living at Seafield House, Bank Well Road and died 5 years later, on 18th April 1884, aged 77, leaving his estate to his oldest son Andrew (of Carvenom).
Entrepreneurial trading and manufacturing
The second son of the East Pitcorthie family, John Gilchrist (1814-1893) also began adult life as an agricultural labourer. At the time of the first census in 1841 he is living in Upper Kilrenny with his wife, fifty year old Margaret Gilchrist (nee Nicolson), born in neighbouring Ceres, who he married in 1835. Since then he seems to have branched out as grocer, possibly taking on his uncle William Gilchrist’s grocery business on East Green Street, Anstruther, and later setting up as a shoe and boot maker. He established a ‘manufactory’ tollbooth in Cellardyke and innovatively introduced sewing machines and cutters, with improvements and steam powered adaptations invented by himself that considerably improved production. By 1871 he had bought and converted a row of buildings on the corner of John Street, employing around fifty men and women and attracting the attention of the Bishop of St Andrews. He may have paid attractive wages, for example there is a case reported in the East of Fife Record of a female worker leaving one employment to take a job as a riveter earning five shillings a week. An article in the Cellardyke Echo describes the premises as having been “considerably enlarged to suit his rapidly increasing wholesale business. A spacious gallery has been erected over the long range of workshops, which may be described as the machine room of this wonderful factory. Here some eight or nine sewing machines work away as busy grasshoppers in autumn, in stitching together and binding the “uppers” of boots and shoes, though, of course, the ‘admired of all admirers’ the beautiful American invention for sewing the soles”. John Gilchrist is attributed with a “singular aptitude for mechanics” and the East Neuk Rambler suggests that while “there is little poetry in a shoemaker’s shop […] but the story of the iron handed sewer is quite a romance.” In addition to his manufacturing interests, John was reputed to be a keen musician and plant grower, performing at local concerts and winning many prizes at shows (especially for fuschias and geraniums). He is noted for lending plants for the decorations at town events. According to local records, in the 1870s John seems to have used his profits to become a landlord, buying up several properties around Anstruther but only ten years later these were being systematically sold off. In 1891, aged 79, he is living with the Reid family in the home of his daughter’s family, at 14 Shore Street, on the Cellardyke harbour front.
Cellardyke Harbour With 14 Shore Street On The Left
I have not been able to discover the reasons for his decline but John was admitted to the Cupar asylum for pauper lunatics, now known as Stratheden Hospital, in a ‘very weak’ condition, suffering from ‘mania’ and congestion of the lungs. He died within a year in January 1893. Responsibility for ‘pauper lunacy’ care in the late Victorian period was embedded within the structure of poor relief and funded by charitable and public finances so his admission suggests that John had fallen on hard times and may have been mentally ill. It has proved more difficult to confirm the identity and find out more about my female forebears but we know that (Milton) Andrew’s wife, Elspeth was from Crail, just along the coast. Her parents were James Lindsay (1772-1854) and Elizabeth Greig (1778-1850) who were married in Kilrenny in 1800 on the 22nd February and had 10 children together. Her mother was a local girl, born in nearby Kingsbarns on 26th September 1778 and died at Kilrenny on April 1st 1850 aged 71 years. Carvenom Andrew’s three wives appear to have come from further afield, Dundee and Perthshire, indicating a more outward looking life, probably driven by his own interests and improvements in transport. A Victorian gentleman and pioneering philanthropist Having started life working on his father’s farm at Milton, the second Andrew Gilchrist took on tenancies in his own right, first of Carvenom as a comparatively young man and later of nearby Balhouffie Farm, employing teams of loyal workers, including three generations of the same family. In addition to being regarded as a good employer, Andrew followed his father’s example and immersed himself in various aspects of civic life: serving on the Carnbee Parish Council, the Boards of the newly opened Ovenstone Hospital (for treatment of infectious diseases) and Carnbee School, as well as being involved in overseeing the Mission work at Spalefield and subsequently at Bonerbo. In 1895 he was appointed as a Justice of the Peace and represented the parish on the St. Andrews District Committee of the County Council. He was said to be particularly helpful in overseeing infrastructure projects, such as water supply and road making. Andrew applied his entrepreneurial spirit to the improvement of bridges and drainage on his farms and the surrounding land. He acted as engineer for the introduction of gravitational water supply to many farms in East Fife and offered his experience freely to the coastal communities and in recognition of this contribution Andrew was conferred the honour of burgess of the Burgh of Kilrenny. He was a staunch member of the Liberal Party, chairing the local branch.
He married Marjory Fisher in 1862 in Aberlemno (Angus) at the Manse of her brother, with the marriage notice having been given in Dundee, where she had lived with her mother, a lemonade and ginger beer manufacturer, in the rapidly developing docks area. Marjory Fisher, the mother of James (my great grandfather) and his two older brothers was the only daughter of Alexander Fisher, born in Moneydie, Perthshire in 1834. In 1851 she is a teenager living in Westport, Dundee, with her widowed mother, Elizabeth Fisher, and three brothers. The family lived at Carvenom Farm, now a substantial house located a little way inland from Anstruther, where their three sons were born. This first marriage foundered when Marjory became mentally ill with depression and ‘acute mania’. Aged only 37, she was admitted to the James Murray’s Royal Lunatic Asylum, Perth, in May 1871, following a suicide attempt, leaving behind her three young sons in Kilrenny. She died less than 10 months later on 7th February 1872. Andrew’s younger sister Elizabeth (Betsy) came to live with the young family at Carvenom and in the 1871 census, she is listed as his housekeeper. Soon after Andrew married thirty-eight year old Christina Logie on 18th February 1873, an independent householder living in Errol, between Perth and Dundee. Unfortunately she died only two years later giving birth to their daughter, who lived just a few weeks. Andrew’s and Marjory’s sons attended the newly opened Madras Academy in St Andrews, possibly as boarders since the railway line from Anstruther wasn’t completed until 1887, each doing well and winning academic prizes. Widowed and with three teenage boys at home, Andrew employed Isabel Buist Richie as his housekeeper and proceeded to marry her in 1882 in Edinburgh. Despite their age difference, this was a long marriage and they went on to have eight children together, half-siblings to Andrew, John and James. The ‘pater familias’ of Carvenom was active in local politics and philanthropy but according to local newspapers, his role in civic affairs was not without controversy: he championed workers’ education and was determined to apply the latest scientific developments to the advantage of local people. This included using his steam traction engines for ploughing and to haul fishing boats to and from the beach to their overwinter stances at the east end of Cellardyke (charging a fee of 11 shillings a boat), as well as harvesting ‘street manure’ for application on his fields.
Steam Plough In Use On Carvenom Farm
In 1871 he was appointed superintendent of the steam station for the county and the first set of machines arrived soon after arrived soon after. Andrew died in 1911 at home, aged 80, after an illness lasting a few months. According to an obituary in the East of Fife Record, his funeral cortege to Kilrenny Kirk included mourners from all parts of the district and his coffin was carried into the church by farm workers of many years standing.
The boat cradles invented by Andrew Gilchrist for use with his steam traction engines
Dispersal of the next generation
All three boys from the first marriage appeared to do well, though the eldest Andrew Fisher Gilchrist worked on the Kilrenny farms before emigrating to Canada, reportedly using steam engines to develop forestry estates. John Dow Fisher Gilchrist, was awarded bursaries to study zoology at Edinburgh University, and subsequently undertook research at various European Universities before being awarded his Doctorate in 1905 with a thesis on the ‘development of South African fishes’. He was appointed to a professorship at Cape Town University where he married and died after a distinguished academic career in marine biology. The youngest son, James Gilchrist (my great grandfather) entered New College at Edinburgh University, and served an indentured apprenticeship with Messrs Belfrage and Carfrae, civil engineers and land valuators. Here he received practical training in land surveying and engineering and was awarded a BSc in 1889, including a first class honours in Chemistry. After graduating he worked as a civil engineer in Lancashire, London and the Scottish Lowlands, while starting a young family. In later life, from 1905, he worked at Leeds University lecturing in civil engineering, with a special interest in the stability of airplanes. Between 1917 and 1919 James served as president of the Yorkshire division of the Institute of Civil Engineers.
Educational prowess
The children of the third marriage at Carvenom attended the newly opened Waid Academy in Anstruther and seem also to have been similarly gifted, winning prizes and actively involving themselves in sports and the Mutual Improvement Society.
Waid School Hockey Team Betsy ( Elizabeth) Gilchrist Far Right
They all matriculated to Edinburgh University in the early twentieth century to study variously philosophy, psychology, modern languages, law, medicine, mathematics and chemistry; though curiously none seemed interested in engineering. Of the four girls one, Elizabeth, joined the ranks of the early female doctors and also gained a Ph. D. in ‘the slow oxidation of phosphorus’. Isabelle seems to have become a nurse, perhaps due to war-time experience in the medical corps. Their father had championed girls’ education and it is perhaps not surprising that his daughters were able to take advantage of the relatively new opportunities to study for university degrees. This tradition and its accompanying expectations has followed us down the generations and I, for one, am grateful for the privileged foundations we have inherited. Reflection It seems that my curiosity and pride in the ‘Gilchrist of East Neuk’ is justified. It has been fascinating to discover more about this pioneering family and to explore the landscapes around Kilrenny, Anstruther and Cellardyke. The facts and images presented here are drawn from various sources, but I’d love to hear from anyone who can reveal new dimensions of our history, especially to shed new light on some of the women mentioned in the article.
Thanks to Harry Watson, Richard Wemyss, Roddy Greig and Kevin Dunion for their encouragement and providing several of the photos here.