He will celebrate his 100th birthday on September 12 – and Hardie Carruthers is still in fine fettle.
It’s a real pleasure talking to Palnackie’s oldest resident at his bedside.
Through the window a beautiful view of the Almorness peninsula and Orchardton Bay stretches away into the distance as a flutter of chaffinches compete with a wood pigeon at the bird table outside.
The former railwayman and gamekeeper tells me he was named after his mother Agnes Hardie who was born a stone’s throw from the English border at Canonbie and grew up in the Muckle Toon of Langholm.
His father Samuel, I learn, hailed from Todhills, a hamlet near Carlisle, which decades later would lend its name to the last northbound services on the M6 motorway.
“I was the youngest of five and came to Palnackie from Gretna in 1927 as a young boy of four,” Hardie says in a clear voice.
“My dad was the game keeper on Orchardton Estate.
“He had been a fireman at the big munitions works at Eastriggs and Gretna during the First World War.”
That terrible and futile waste of lives left hardly a mother in Scotland untouched and the Carruthers family was no different although, Hardie informs me, it was carnage of a different kind which claimed the life of his uncle who was a fireman on a troop train carrying young Royal Scots soldiers, mainly from Leith, to England and onward passage to Gallipoli.
The train had only reached Gretna when at 6.49am on May 22, 1915, it slammed into a stationary local passenger train parked on the line.
Seconds later a northbound passenger express ploughed into the wreckage, sparking a horrible inferno.
Many soldiers trapped in twisted beams and metal were burned to death as gas used for lighting the wooden carriages ignited.
The two negligent railway workers responsible were later convicted of culpable homicide.
“My uncle Rob was a fireman on one of the trains,” Hardie recalls.
“It was a terrible tragedy.
“My dad used to speak about it.
“There was a train shunted from one line to the other to let another one past.
“But the signalmen forgot about it and opened the points and the signal.
“The troop train came
right on through and crashed into the stationary one
and the train carrying the soldiers couped onto the northbound line.
“A minute later the express ploughed into it and that’s when the real damage was done.
“My uncle was killed at Quintinshill.”
After almost a century of life, Hardie still retains a remarkable memory for someone his age, those from his childhood especially vivid.
“Mrs Maxwell owned Orchardton Estate and my dad was gamekeeper here,” he recalls.
“His employer was Sir Kynaston Studd, who started a polytechnic in London.
“At Palnackie school I can remember Mr Patrick, who was the head teacher.
“He was very strict and I was scared to death of him.
“When he came into class he would take the belt out of his pocket and lay it on the desk.
“He used it very freely.
“He was a great friend of Bob and Jean Turner who lived in this house before us.
“They were tenant farmers and left for a farm in Aberdeenshire.”
Hardie, I learn, was the youngest of five children – which, he recalls, had certain advantages.
“When the rest were at school I was left on my own and my wee terrier Dinty was my companion all the time,” he smiles.
“I started working with dogs when I was seven or eight.
“I would take my Labrador Peg out for walks and give her commands.
“By the time I was leaving Palnackie School I had a young dog, Doris, and started to bring her on.”
Self-sufficiency was the norm for country working families in the inter-war years – and the Carruthers clan at Palnackie, Hardie tells me, was no different.
“I would help my dad with the bees as a boy,” he says.
“He had five or six hives and my mum would put the sections of honey into a wee drum.
“It would spin round until the liquid honey ran out and mum would put it into glass jars.
“My dad used to feed the bees in the hive to keep them going over the winter.
“There was a certain time of the year you could buy bee sugar in the shop and you made a feed for them from that.
“My mum would make her own butter as well, in her own wee wooden drum.
“She would shake it until the milk inside began to turn to butter.
“I can still hear the slosh and plop of the lumps beginning to form.
“I led a very happy life and the family were all great for one another.
“A lot of families don’t get on but we were the opposite and looked after one another.
“My mum was a great baker and loved to make apple cake.
“At tea-time my dad would always joke ‘Well, where’s the apple cake Agnes?’”
It was hard outdoor work in late 1920s and the family would sit down to a cooked supper at 10.30pm – and that was after a big tea.
“Our house was known for being great company and people were always coming and going, even at night-time,” Hardie smiles,
“Quite a lot of cards were played in those days and we would play rummy or whist.
“Very often there would be singing – some good singers came and we could all play the mouth organ.
“They would be old Scots songs like The Bonnie Lass o’ Ballochmyle and Green Grow the Rashes O’.
“My sister Ettie used to be in great demand to sing at all the local concerts round about.
“That’s what happened in those days.”
It’s a privilege and an education listening to Hardie, his recollections of events more than 90 years ago still clear.
Shooting game was a part of country life – and learning everything about gamekeeping from his father.
“My dad used to rear the pheasants and I used to run over the fields to meet him coming home,” he says.
“I was always desperate to get my first shot.
“He had a lovely old gun and one day along the side of Kilfearn Wood – I would be about seven – he set me up.
“There was a bunch of nettles and a rabbit clapped down in them and when I fired the recoil threw me right back against my dad.
“I was only trying to make him see I could do it to get another shot at a rabbit!”
Hardie has many memories from his years at Dalbeattie High School – times when the town was a real hive of industry.
Back then, he recalls, the road out to the quarry was made from granite setts, little granite blocks measuring approximately ten inches by four.
From the family cottage near Palnackie to school
was an eight-mile round trip – and granite cobbles were not the best surface riding
a push bike.
“There were granite setts right out to the Craignair Bridge,” Hardie tells me.
“I would cycle along the pavement because it was tarmac and much smoother and I would meet the men from the quarry coming the other way from their work.
“They were wearing tackety boots and I can still hear the clatter of their boots on the cobblestones.
“They were all white from breaking the stone and were covered in fine powder from head to toe.
“A lot of people then would die of chest troubles because they never wore masks.”
Hardie had just left school when the Second World War broke out – barely 20 years after the first one ended.
Not old enough to sign up – Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, nine days before his 16th birthday – Hardie had to find a civilian job.
“I was too young to go in the forces,” he says.
“I worked with my dad for a while as third keeper at Orchardton then got a job on the railway.
“It was a protected job – I had to get a job like that.
“I started at Upperby Motive Power near
Carlisle working from
the engine shed.
“If you wanted to be on the footplate – a driver – you started as a cleaner.
“The next move up was a passed cleaner which allowed you to do relief work acting as fireman, which was another step up the ladder, then it was fireman and passed fireman.
“Part of the job was preparing the engine and oiling it thoroughly.
“The driver and the firemen would share the preparation for the road.
“The locomotive had a three piston engine with two pistons either side and one in the middle.
“For that one you had to go below the train to oil the rod ends.
“We worked on ordinary goods trains and the smaller passenger trains.
“It was not that heavy work stoking the train because journeys were local – there was a passenger link round the west coast of Cumberland by Whitehaven and Workington.
“But with the long distance trains you had to work harder on them because the engines would be pulling 18 or 20 coaches and there would be much more weight for them to pull.
“The longest journey was Carlisle to London.
“I was on the railways 12 years and drove thousands of miles.”
Ferrying goods and people safely to their destinations, pride in maintaining the great steam engines and camaraderie among the railwaymen, Hardie tells me, all made for a satisfying job.
However, there was one big drawback – keeping the wheels of industry turning meant doing shifts and working irregular hours.
“Very often you would be working on trains in the middle of the night,” Hardie recounts.
“It was London, Midland and Scottish during the war then British Railways, which was nationalised.
“I would be lying in bed with Jean at some ungodly hour and you knew you had to get up.
“To make sure you did they had a knocker-upper who would come through the night at any time.
“His job was to knock you up an hour before you were due to start work.
“Jean could not be doing with that chap on the door.
“She would wake up with her hands over her ears.
“Sometimes she would be listening for the knocker-upper coming and would knock on the window at him before he could chap the door.
“Quite often she would tell him to his face not to bother!”
Hardie smiles at his memories of Jean, who he met at a dance in the Crown and Mitre Hotel in Carlisle.
His best friend Tom Milburn, who also worked on the railway, had invited him along and, in a piece of unintentional matchmaking, Tom’s girlfriend Marjorie had asked Jean to come with her.
“That’s how I met Jean,” Hardie remembers fondly.
“We got on really well from the start.
“We were natural together and were always great for one another.
“I had not known Jean long before we got married – it was just months.
“A lot of folk said ‘you’re not taking long!’ but I would always say what’s the point in waiting if you want to be together?
“The trouble was I had already booked a holiday in Jersey with Tom.
“The two of us had a nice time – but I told Jean I wished I had met her before I
booked it!
“We got married on February 8, 1948, in the same church as my mum and dad – Upperby Church in Carlisle.
“Jean was from Carlisle and I never met her mum and dad.
“He was badly wounded during the war and had a very bad limp.
“He died before I could meet him.”
* Don’t miss part two of Hardie’s story in the Galloway News next week.
