There are just sometimes when I need to stop and say “thank you” and this is one of them!
The last few months have just been simply overwhelming with items, documents and photos donated to me for safe keeping, including some incredible collections I could only dream about! I’m just astonished by the kindness of people from far and wide.
I wrote recently about being given the Calderglen collection of old photos of the house, grounds and family as well as many trinkets and Blantyre memorabilia of the Cochrane family. Quite simply, all those items shipped to me from London will take months to look through, write about and to show you all!
More recently in the last few weeks, I’ve also been given loads of railway maps, kindly dropped off by George Hay, which I will make available soon.
John Reid kindly gave me loads of history and photos of Reid Printers, which was sincerely appreciated. Roy O Neil, provided details about Limetree Garage on the Burnbank boundary and shared several old photos of his father’s (John O Neil’s) garage on Glasgow Road.
Also kindly given to me were copies of old Blantyre Gazettes and the extended ancestry of the Robertson family of Springwell.
Sanny McVicar also took time to drop by and as well as his Highland Games Photos, he left several reels of cine film with me, which I’ve converted to electronic format, giving him his reels back with a DVD of them all! Amazingly they contain 1960’s film footage of High Blantyre Prefabs at the Industrial Estate, the estate itself, Basket Farm, playing at Milheugh Falls, playing on the former elevated Railway lines through Blantyre and the construction of the East Kilbride Expressway!! It’s just brilliant and a great piece of Blantyre nostalgia and with permission to show you all, thats coming VERY soon to the page!
However, the pinnacle and most exciting thing to be given to me in recent weeks most definitely has to be 340 crystal clear previously unseen photos of old Blantyre taken between the 1890’s and 1920’s! They were actually taken by a distant relative of mine [David Ritchie], and passed to Alex Bowie, who soon will be moving abroad. Before he emigrates, Alex kindly came to my home the other evening and has provided a copy of the photos, which also depict Bothwell, Lanark, Auchentibber and Ayrshire. We had quite the evening sitting viewing them all!! Again, with permission, I hope to write about and show each and every one in due course. Very, very exciting.
I’m overwhelmed by all this kindness and it ensures, as always, fresh, new, unseen content will appear DAILY on this page for a long time to come! My Blantyre memorabilia ‘museum’ is bulging and my eyes…we’ll they’re bulging too…. like a ‘kid walking into Mickey’s Cafe for the first time!”
Thank you everybody!
