I'm writing this is Sandbach in Cheshire, England using the computer of my friends, Celia and Joyce. I can look out of the window at their lovely back garden but I haven't organised access to my photo library yet so I can't post a photo. I'll add one later. Celia and Joyce live in a small cottage right in the centre of the old town of Sandbach with its Celtic cross in the cobbled square. My brother, Dave, dropped me off here yesterday on our drive back down the motorway from our Burden family re-union in Arrochar, Scotland. Dave and Jill and my niece, Grace, all had afternoon tea with Celia in the warm sun at the bottom of the garden. It was achingly English!
Burden family history
Today I want to write something about the family gathering in Arrochar. I'm not quite sure how the Labels function works in a blog but I think I need to start trying that so that it is easier to follow the organisation as I get further into my travels. In one of my previous posts I put up a photo of my great grandparents, Augustus and Minnie, surrounded by their many sons all of whom were in the Royal Navy, and their youngest, their only daughter. My grandfather is the sailor on the left of the photo. James Alexander Burden married Elizabeth Florence Triggs in Portsmouth and they had eleven children. In 1926, when my father was 11 years old the family migrated to Arrochar in Scotland where my grandfather worked as a Navy diver on the torpedo testing range that was built on the NW side of Loch Long opposite the village. The family lived in one of three cottages at The Range as the torpedo testing site was called.
Some of the Burden descendants remain in and around the Arrochar area whilst others are scattered all over the world. The gathering brought together over 100 members of this scattered clan. The Kellys are the family of my aunt Nora and are mostly located in Scotland. Jim Kelly still lives in Arrochar and worked with my own brother, also Jim, who lives on his boat in Ardrossan, to enable the gathering to happen. We gathered in a converted church, the Ben Lomond tea rooms, at Tarbet on Loch Lomond. Tarbet is in easy walking distance from Arrochar and I started my school days at the Tarbet School. I am told my mother walked me over from the basement that we lived in at Greenbank in Arrochar village pushing my younger brother Dave in a stroller. I cried and they sent for my older brother, Jim, who was already established at the school.
The setting
Arrochar is located on a very beautiful sea loch called Loch Long. Looking across the loch from the seaweed strewn beach on the village side, the Cobbler is the dominating feature of the landscape. People rarely use the official name of the mountain, Ben Arthur, but it has always been a popular walking and climbing area. During the industrial depression years of the 1930s when many people were out of work from Clyde shipbuilding and industrial areas of Glasgow, many young men came out to Arrochar and lived on the hillsides, coming into the village every few days for essential supplies. They must have been resourceful men as it is often rainy and cold even in the summer months!
During the war years at the turn of the decade into the 1940s, when several of my uncles and my father were away, my grandfather supplemented the family table with venison shot on the hills and salmon poached from the streams. We always ate well! Several of my aunties also worked in the land army or the munitions factory. Today, there is a community cafe called the Pitstop where there are photos of groups of workers from the war years, including one of a group of children knitting for the troops.
Both my brothers, Jim and Dave, and my sister, Jackie, came to the gathering and we all stayed in the Arrochar hotel or the Loch Long hotel. Jim had one of his sons, Joe, and his girlfriend, Jo, join us but Jim's oldest son, Jimmy, couldn't make it over from Hong Kong where he now lives. Jackie was joined by her daughter, Sholeh, with two of her friends, Aaron, an Australian currently teaching in a London school, and Hootan, a Californian whose background is middle Eastern. I felt warmly supported by the diversity of our extended family.
The Arrochar hotel is large and very white with a stunning view to the Cobbler. We were very comfortable there together with some of the New Zealand Spencers, family of my aunt Doll (Kitty) who is in her 90s and not keen to make the long trip over from the South Island of NZ. My cousins, Linda and John Lionel, were travelling with John's son Peter from NZ, his girlfriend from Scandinavia and John's stepson, Stee, from California.
The gathering
At the gathering, people had brought along collections of photos, some in large albums, others on laptops. The daughters of my uncle Tom, who are still in Scotland, brought my grandfather's old diving knife and his naval certificates and documents. As we gathered for brunch, the chaos was wonderful as people who had not seen each other for years or who only knew each other from photos, spotted resemblances and greeted one another. It was very crowded in the old church. My niece, Grace, quickly indentified someone her own height in the milling throng and they hung out together for the rest of the day. Benny was the grandson of Karen, one of the twins of my aunt Nora. They each drew a picture on adjacent pages in the journal that went around during the day inviting everyone to write a page about their relationship to the family and how they felt about the gathering. It is now my role to transcribe all the entries and email the story to those people who have an address. We still have to decide where the original journal will be kept in Arrochar. It was Geraldine, friend of my older brother, Jim who had the idea for the journal and had caught the bus to Helensburgh on the morning of the gathering to find a suitable book.
After brunch, we all circulated and chatted. My uncle Blackie, who is 92, settled by the television to watch Royal Ascot. He had a bet on a horse that was running at 50 to 1, and gradually the tip filtered through to others of us and we put small each way bets on as the odds came down to 37 to 1. The chatter began to centre in the corner where the television gave glimpses of the horses as they were being pushed into the starting boxes. I had a bet on through my cousin Peggy, who is my contemporary, lives in California and is one of the daughters of uncle Blackie. There was an excited buzz as the race started and then everyone started shouting at once. Some of us who knew how to read a race were getting more and more excited and this was infectious. I had no idea what was happening until the huge roar at the end told me that our horse had come in first!
Amazingly quickly, it was time for us to sit down again for our Scottish high tea and afterwards we had the only slightly formal side of the gathering. My cousin, Jim Kelly, and my brother, Jim, both wore kilts and were to give short speeches and my uncle John, who had come over from Australia with my auntie Marjorie, were scheduled to speak and then John Lionel from NZ also said a few words. It was a very emotional part of the gathering and rounded off a remarkable coming together of a caring and diverse group of people from around the world.
Sunday
On the Sunday morning, many of us gathered at the Arrochar church, where there are four Burden family headstones scattered amongst the neat lines of graves that slope down to the loch at the front of the church. My mother and father are buried here together and I recall looking up towards the Cobbler as we lowered their coffins into the grave. The minister who conducted my mother's funeral, some decades after my father's, is still at the church and has facilitated a remarkable renovation of the old church building. My cousins, Jim and Margaret Kelly, played a very significant role in raising funds and co-ordinating all the volunteer work that went in to the re-building when the church was condemned and it looked like it would be closed down. Now the church is a joy to visit, with beautiful stained glass windows set in stone arches and the high ceiling painted in the blue and white crosses of the Scottish national flag.
I left the church with my sister in the rain. People were starting to disperse and I felt a sense of withdrawal. In the afternoon, Jackie was to drive her daughter Sholeh with her two friends to Glasgow airport to catch a plane down to London. I decided to go walking on my own and set off round the head of the loch to find the new path that zigzags up the foothills to the boggy, moorland valley that leads to the Cobbler. I knew that I would not be able to go the full way on such a wet day but wanted to climb the first part. I found that there are now several fairly easy walks that can be done around Arrochar. A common path leads up the hill and then runs along the side of the hill and through the forest to Ardgarten or you can go the other way and loop around to Succoth at the head of the loch. The track that leads on up the Cobbler comes off this path. I decided to set off to Ardgarten where Scottish national parks has an information centre and a campsite that used to be managed by my uncle Tom who had been a forester. The burns (Scottish for streams or creeks) were full and plunging noisily down the side of the hill. The views down to the loch and Arrochar were lovely and the hillside glistened green and grey from the rain. I came to a fork in the forestry road and took the upper track that lead me, after a half hour or so, to a point halfway up the road to the Rest and be Thankful, a famous pass that leads through to Inverary. To reach more directly the information centre at Ardgarten, I should have taken the lower track and it meant I had an uncomfortable walk down the busy road. By this time the rain was coming down heavily but when my brother drove by on his way up the Rest and be Thankful to look for a sandy beach where my niece Grace could make a castle, the traffic was so heavy that it was dangerous for him to stop for me. So I arrived at the information centre in very wet and bedraggled mode! If you ever find yourself in this situation, head straight for the demountable toilet at the back of the building because they have an excellent blow heater in there and in no time I had dried my hair and gone some way to drying my shirt and shoes. I then spent some time in the information centre buying little celtic knot brooches to take to Celia and Joyce and by then it had stopped raining and I could walk along the burn at Ardgarten and then onto the path at the side of the loch road to head back to Arrochar. On the way I sidetracked onto the old road that leads past the cottages where my grandparents used to live by the old torpedo range. Everything is now derelict. The torpedo range is still there but the old pier is falling down and the whole site is covered in rubble. The cottage where my father was raised is overgrown, all the windows are gone and there are trees growing up through the roof.
Haste ye back
Back at the Arrochar hotel that evening, we had a subdued dinner with two friends of my sister who drove down from Glasgow and afterwards we played with our niece, Grace, and the Human Torso game that Jackie and I had bought her in California. Relatives dropped by for a final dram of whisky and we made our farewells.
On Monday morning, Jackie drove to Glasgow airport to catch a plane back to California and Dave, Jill, Grace and I set off to drive back down the motorway. In my next post, I'll say something about Sandbach where I am now staying for a few days with my friends, Celia and Joyce.
