Last week we left Corsock’s Jim Pringle recounting how, as a 20-year-old, he headed south to start a job with agricultural manufacturers Gush and Dent at Penrith.
The year was 1963, and Jim was a draughtsman in the plant, drawing up plans for made-to-measure tubular gates and stock pens for customers across southern Scotland and the northern counties of England.
“I was the only Scots boy in the factory,” he tells me over a coffee with wife Maretta in the conservatory.
“They held a wee celebration for my 21st birthday and gave me a fancy gold lighter.
“I knew nothing about it – they were good to me down there and I made some good friends.
“But I had to learn to talk English so they could understand me – Penrith has an accent all of its ain.
“I was in digs in a village called Skelton and Jimmy Shand came down to play there twice a year.
“They had a decent dance hall in the village but I could never go because I went home at the weekend.
“I would leave Corsock early on Monday morning and would drive back home 80 miles on Friday night.
“Those were the days before the M6 was built and you had to go through Carlisle.”
Jim’s elder brother Robert, I learn, also left the “hame countrie” for a new job – and ended up half a world away.
“Robert was three years older than me and emigrated to Australia,” Jim explains.
“He was studying engineering at Glasgow then changed to chemistry and got a job in the lab at Dumfries Hospital.
“He moved to Ruchill in Glasgow then the head man there at the time left Scotland to take a job in a new hospital, Fairfield, in Melbourne.
“He was not long out there when he contacted my brother with a job offer.
“Robert decided to go – and he has been there ever since.”
A year after Jim got the job at Penrith he set his sights on a much bigger prize – and asked Maretta to go out with him.
“We first clapped eyes on each other at the Saturday night dancing in Dalbeattie Town Hall,” Jim says with a smile, with Maretta keeping him right on the details.
“Two weeks later me and the other Corsock boys were in Castle Douglas for a dance.
“We would always go to the Station Hotel for a few pints and a game of darts.
“After we got down to the town hall I saw Maretta there and asked her to dance.
“She was a good dancer – then I asked her out and she said aye.
“We only got together on Saturdays to start with.
“I always went out with the boys on a Friday.
“But then things developed and I began going out with Maretta on Friday nights as well.
“We would go to supper dances in the Lochview and Ernespie.
“About a year later we got engaged.”
The young couple were married in Balmaghie Church on April 5, 1968.
And the date, I discover, was significant for reasons beyond the exchange of rings.
“In those days you could claim back a full year’s tax rebate if you were married before midnight, April 5,” laughs Jim.
“Who said love was dead?
“We were cutting it very fine – it was an incentive, I suppose!”
The newlyweds came to stay at their present abode, Glenurr, with Jim’s father James, who was then a shepherd at Troquhain, a nearby hill farm.
“He was shepherd there for 15 years,” said Jim.
“After that he drove the school bus from Corsock to Kirkcudbright via Dalry.
“He was a hell of a man for checking everybody’s sheep in the fields along the way.
“One day he noticed this yowe was cowped on its back.
“He stopped the bus, went over and lifted her back onto her feet.
“She ran away fine and when he got back to the bus all the weans were applauding!”
Meanwhile, Jim had been with Gush and Dent for five years when he fancied a switch from the draughtsmen’s office to the open road.
“Our sales area was from Stranraer to Berwick down to Durham,” he recalls.
“I told the factory manager I was applying for the job.
“The sales manager wasn’t keen but the factory manager got his way and I got it on a trial basis.
“I had my own company car and that was a big attraction for me.
“It was a Ford Anglia – the kind of car you couldn’t kill.
“When I was on the east coast my base was a hotel in Hexham.
“Sometimes I would stay in Stranraer if I was in the west – but in Wigtownshire folk were aye asking me in for a cup of tea.
“The sales manager would say you have to stop because it’s taking up too much time.
“But I just told him ‘ye cannae offend the customers’!
“I met a lot of them at the market in Newton Stewart.”
Jim made a success of his salesman’s job, which, I learn, entailed visiting potential customers who had replied on prepaid business cards mailed out by the company to the local sales area.
Not every call resulted in a sale – especially when mischievous children were involved.
“One of the cards was for Port William,” Jim recalls with a smile.
“But when I got there it was for an address on the main street.
“I thought it was a bit strange that it was a hoose and not a farm.
“Anyway, I chapped the door then chapped again but nobody came.
“Then I heard somebody shouting “come in!” so I did.
“And when I went through here’s this parrot calling me into the hoose!
“It turned out that it was the woman’s wee boy who had sent back the card as a prank.
“He probably never thought anything would come of it.
“The mother was shocked when I arrived – but not as shocked as me when I found out it was a parrot that had shouted me in the door!”
After four years in sales with Gush and Dent, Jim’s next stop was a job with Ecclefechan builder Jim Barr who had a prefabricated farm buildings business at Heathhall.
“Jim was a customer of Gush and Dent and I was at Heathhall one day when Jim said he was looking for a clerk of works to check on jobs on site,” Jim recalls.
“I decided to take the job – then the sales manager left.
“Highland Show time was when you got your orders and I had helped out so I got a job on the sales side again.
“I covered the whole of Scotland and was doing 1,000 miles a week.
“I was at Heathhall for 11 years when the grants for hill cow shelters stopped and switched to big concrete sheds instead. That hit us hard and when Jim decided to give up the building site and concentrate on the garden centre I left.
“That was 1983. Then Robert Sproat, the managing director of JR Wallace, the foundry at Castle Douglas, approached me with a job.
“It involved sales of farm buildings, mostly Dutch barns, extensions and lean-tos.
“I was there until 1987 when the company decided to call it a day.
“The receivers kept me on for a full year while they got things organised.
“I was looking for work and coming through Clarebrand one day I decided to pop in and see if Jock Armstrong had any jobs.
“I was hardly in the door back home when the phone rang.
“It was Jock asking me to help run the office at JJ Armstrong (Clarebrand)
Ltd.
“The firm was very involved in open cast mining, transport and quarrying.
“But after four years the Clarebrand operation closed and that was me without a job again.”
Smile in the face of adversity could be Jim’s motto, it seems – so it’s no surprise to learn he had made contingency plans.
“When I was still with Jock I had sketched out plans to turn our garage next the house into a pub,” he says.
“I had already run darts teams and pool teams and helped out on the bar at Lochview.
“The folk at the pub up the road, the Elasaid, had done a moonlight flit so I got my drawings out again.
“I said to Maretta ‘let’s have a go at it’.
“I could only do it with her help and I managed to get her talked round.
“Just over a year later the pub was open.
“Maybe the workmen were working speedily because they were keen to get a pub back in the village again!
“The bar and some other things came out of the Elasaid
“The new owner of the property said we could take anything we wanted.”
The first pints were pulled at Pringles, Jim tells me, on a Friday night in November 1995.
“It was really busy and the local folk really supported us,” he recalls.
“We had weekend regulars coming down from the Glenkens, Moniaive, Castle Douglas and Dumfries.
“We had a ladies’ darts team and a mixed pool team and the ladies won a lot of trophies which are still in there yet.
“There were folk musicians came every Wednesday night as well.
“It started off with just three but it gradually built up.
“On January 2, 1996, we had over 30 of them playing in the New Year – it was amazing.
“They had been playing in Moniaive and Tynron on New Year’s Day then word got around and they all came here.
“Folk got to know the musicians were coming and the place would be absolutely jam packed.”
To some, Corsock may seem in the middle of nowhere – but it stands at an important country crossroads.
That means all sorts of travellers come through en route to somewhere else – and Jim recalls one group being a real showstopper.
“One day at lunchtime these two US police cars pulled up at the pub,” he laughs.
“Four folk came in for a bite of lunch – all the guys were American and heading for an exhibition in Glasgow.
“The kids at the school across the road were out for their playtime and the teacher said she couldn’t get them back in until the police cars went.
“When they did they switched on their lights and had the sirens going full blast – the kids loved it.”
In 2002, Jim tells me, he took on another job – as village sub-postmaster.
“They were shutting the shop and post office three doors down from us,” he recalls.
“So we brought the post office into the pub.
“We set it up in a corner customers called the sheep pen which had all these photos of prizewinning tups on the wall.
“But they shut us down in the first round of closures in 2008 along with Mossdale and Balmaclellan.
“They realised their mistake after a year or so and stopped closing so many other village post offices.
“But once they were closed there was no way they were ever going to reopen.”
After 14 years behind the bar, Jim tells me, he gave up the pub in 2009 due to ill health.
“My son Brian and my daughter-in-law Wilma said they would like to take it on and have a go at running it,” he says.
“I needed a quadruple heart bypass and Brian said he would stay in it until after I had my operation. That was in 2012.”
“I had less and less energy but I thought I would only need a couple of stents.
“But they came back and said it was more serious and I was going to need a bypass operation.
“I went up to the Golden Jubilee for more tests came back home but heard nothing for a long time.
“At my next appointment in Dumfries they asked me how the operation went in Glasgow.
“I said ‘what operation?’
“Then all merry hell was let loose – apparently I had somehow fallen off their radar.
“A month later I was back up getting my operation from the top guy, Mr Colquhoun.”
What of the future now that Jim’s put his feet up, I wonder?
“Well, we will have to do something with the property,” he says.
“We fair missed the pub at the time and the social side of things.
