Today’s picture is High Blantyre lassie, Miss Ritchie. This is certainly one of joiner and photographer, David Ritchie’s children, but I’m not sure which one. Lizzie? Minnie?
The picture is from just before 1900, making it over 120 years old. The Ritchie family lived at one time on School Lane, then at Broompark Avenue in the early 20th Century. Miss Ritchie (as we’ll call her for this post), like her siblings was a pupil of High Blantyre School on Hunthill Road.
Perhaps a striking feature of this post is her rather harsh haircut, which has all the traces of being done by parents with an upturned bowl! The photo is slightly damaged with a mark which crosses her face.
Stopping for a second, Miss Ritchie would have been nearly 20 years old, even by the outbreak of the FIRST World War! She would have been a young woman in the roaring twenties and thirties and approaching middle age by the SECOND World War.
I know relatives of the family follow this page, so if you can identify her first name, I’d be happy to update the article.