Most of us will have heard of the Wright Brothers and their remarkable achievements in 1903 in undertaking the world first heavier than air flight. (albeit a very short one and a crash). This was the birth of flight. As the world looked on with unknowing, wry curiosity at these early strange machines which would […]
Thomas Taylor, was a man greatly in advance of his times. The Blantyre man was an inventor of one of the earliest reaping machines and Blantyre readers will be proud to know that he (attempted) to make one of the First Flying Machines, a full 43 years before the successful flight of the Wright Brothers […]
Mr James Duddy was born in 1871 in Mountpleasant, Church Hill, Donegal, Ireland, a son for Michael Duddy and Mary McCay. He moved to Scotland seeking employment and became a miner in Hamilton, where he met and married a local girl Mary Jane Wallace (b1872) on Hogmanay 1890. Children soon followed. Sadly, their daughter Susanna, […]
On Saturday 18th September 1915, the Hamilton Advertiser reported that a Blantyre hero was missing on active service during WW1. Captain Wilson was feared to be a Prisoner of War of the Germans. The brief official notification that Captain Frederick John Cowan Wilson of the pioneering “Flying Corps”, was missing, was received in Blantyre with […]