Catholic Connections

We McWilliams, at least those in my piece of the story, are mostly a pretty Presbyterian lot, brought up in the Church of Scotland. Undoubtedly, though, this hasn’t always been the case. In the distant past our ancestors were almost certainly Catholic. The Scottish Reformation of 1560 tried to outlaw Catholicism and the practising of Mass, but some parts of the country remained staunch to their Catholic heritage. These tended to be fairly remote parts, where the law did not have much of a reach, and one of these areas was rural Banffshire – particularly the upper reaches of Inveravon and the Cabrach, and the town of Huntly (or Strathbogie as it was) in Aberdeenshire.

As testimony to this, the remote college at Scalan in the Braes of Glenlivet was once a seminary and was one of the few places in Scotland where the Roman Catholic faith was kept alive during the troubled times of the 18^th century. For much of that time Scalan was the only place in Scotland where young men were trained to be priests. To this day there is a strong Catholic presence in large parts of Banffshire and Aberdeenshire, and the Scalan building remains open as a museum.

Scalan

Some entries back I quoted from a document written by Hugh Duff McWilliam (HDM) in 1903, and here is an extract:

“As illustrating that the name was formerly McPherson, there is a tradition that a certain John McWilliam (said to be a brother of Alexander and William first, of the family in Delgarvan) quitted Glenlivet and settled in Bracklach in the Parish of Cabrach some years prior to 1745 and that at the ’45 he paid a substitute to take part in the rising and dressed him in the MacPherson tartan”

At the Aberdeen Family research Centre I have had it confirmed that John McWilliam and his family were resident at Bracklach at that time and also that they were Catholic. HDM suggests that he was a brother of Alexander and William McWilliam of Delgarvan – and I believe from the dates we see here that this William McWilliam was likely an ancestor of our very own Lewis McWilliam. Maybe this means that our own McWilliam family had been Catholic until the time of the Jacobite setbacks and ultimate defeat! Or maybe it means that John McWilliam married a Catholic and decided to convert. These are only guesses, but there is undoubtedly a Catholic connection!

Then there was that McPherson connection I referred to some time ago too – and HDM makes mention of Abbé Paul McPherson. Again, like the Prof, he is someone of special interest because he rose to real prominence (in the Catholic Church in this case) – and therefore much is known about his life. Paul was born in 1756 into a Catholic family on a croft at Scalan. His mother died when he was just 6 years old and he was educated by an old neighbour and at the seminary. At the age of just 13 he left to train at the Scots Colleges in Rome and Valladolid, and he grew up to be a priest who was also an important diplomat for the Vatican. There is absolutely no evidence that his ancestors were any of those McWilliams who were perhaps encouraged to change their surname to McPherson (as claimed by HDM). Nevertheless I am sure he merits a mention here as I consider the Catholic connections in our past.  There is more about him here. http://www.scalan.co.uk/scalannews32.htm

Most of the tenanted farms around Banffshire and beyond were parts of huge areas of land owned by the Dukes of Gordon. The Dukes were based predominantly at Huntly Castle but they owned several other large houses and estates and much farmland. The small farms at Smithston and Glencorrie were part of this.  The first two Dukes of Gordon (and their predecessors as Marquesses of Huntly) were Catholic by heritage and they stood staunchly by this heritage through the difficult times of the Reformation and beyond. Then things started to get complicated.

”During the Jacobite Uprisings of 1715 - 1716 and 1745 - 1746 there were Gordons on both sides. The 2nd Duke of Gordon followed the Jacobites in 1715, but Cosmo Gordon, 3rd Duke of Gordon supported the British government by the time of the 1745 uprising, while his brother, Lord Lewis Gordon, raised two regiments against him at the Battle of Inverurie (1745), the Battle of Falkirk (1746) and the Battle of Culloden (1746).”

I don’t blame John McWilliam of Bracklach for steering clear of all this and paying someone else to go and take his place at Culloden!

The importance of the Dukes of Gordon to the defence of Catholicism is well know and documented. I like this little summary though, as part of a short history of the town of Huntly.

http://www.gordonschools.aberdeenshire.sch.uk/Huntly/HistoryOfHuntly.htm

And finally, two people I have to bring in here are brothers Alexander McWilliam (born 1902) and John Lewis McWilliam (born 1903), who both grew up to be Catholic priests who were well-known in northeast Scotland.
They were born in Buckie (on the Banffshire coast), with grandparents from Tomintoul.  I have no evidence of family connection to our own Lewis McWilliam, but these two surely deserve a mention here.

Canon Alexander (or Sandy as he preferred to be known – and with spelling of MacWilliam) trained at the Scots College in Rome before working as parish priest in Orkney, Chapeltown (Glenlivet) and St. Peter’s Aberdeen.

Canon Lewis (as he preferred to be known) trained at Valladolid in Spain, and became parish priest in Aberdeen, Stonehaven and Beauly before coming to St. Margaret’s in Huntly where he worked until the day he died at age 91 in 1995. I attach a link to his obituary in the Glasgow Herald as well as to a Scalan interview.

I can’t find an obituary for Sandy, but there are many references to him out there – including the attached Scalan story about St. Peter’s in Aberdeen.

They were both clearly great old fellows and people it would have been a pleasure to meet.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/spl/aberdeen/canon-john-mcwilliam-1.656557

http://www.scalan.co.uk/canonlewis.htm

http://www.scalan.co.uk/StPeters.htm

Canon Lewis McWilliam

The Prof: John Alexander MacWilliam (1857 - 1937)

Some blog entries back I referred briefly to Professor John Alexander MacWilliam (1857 – 1937), who was Professor of Physiology at Aberdeen University for all of 41 years from the age of 29 to the age of 70. Since then I have come across much information on this distinguished member of our family – in large part through a lady who got in touch with me as a result of the brief mention. This lady (TW) and her husband happen to be the current owners of a house in Cults of which the Prof and his new wife were the first owners back in 1892. These folks were owners of the local pharmacy for 30 years or so, and so they had many very old and interesting references to the Prof in the pharmacy archives. Amongst other coincidences was that TW herself was born and raised in the same part of Inverness-shire as the Prof.

I won’t try to go deeply into the Prof’s career here, but it is quite clear that he was someone special, whose research has led to a better understanding of the workings of the human heart and in the long term to important innovations such as the pacemaker and the defibrillator. One result of the status he achieved is that many aspects of his life are quite well documented, and I think it is worthwhile to try to summarise some of this here – at least from the aspect of interest in the family heritage.

John Alexander was one of three children born at Culmill Farm at Kiltarlity near Beauly to William McWilliam (originally from Inveravon) and his wife Isabella Cumming (originally from Knockando). The first son and the Prof’s older brother, William Lewis McWilliam, became farmer at Culmill. He married Mary Burns. He died in 1936 aged 81, and his wife died in 1919 at the age of 63. They did not have children and are buried in Kiltarlity churchyard along with the parents William and Isabella. The Prof also had a sister, Isabella Helen McWilliam, born in 1859, who sadly died aged just 16 months. It is maybe worth a brief note here that the spelling McW or MacW seems to have been entirely down to a matter of personal preference. The Prof's work until about 1889 is published under the name J.A. McWilliam, but after that he appears to prefer the MacWilliam spelling.

The Prof’s paternal grandparents were Alexander McWilliam (b. 1768?, Inveravon) and Elspet Gordon (b.1788,  Knockando), and maternal grandparents were John Cumming (b. 1774, Knockando) and Helen Cruickshank (b. 1777, Knockando). 

Our own Lewis McW was an older brother of the Prof’s grandfather Alexander, and so we can describe relationships such as that Lewis was the Prof’s great uncle. Interestingly, the material I have on the Prof seems to confirm most of the previous generation (i.e. 6 of his 8 great-grandparents), including that the parents of our Lewis and his brother Alexander were William McWilliam and his wife Anne Cruickshank.  This makes William and Anne my gggg-grandparents.

And as mentioned elsewhere the Prof was first cousin of Hugh Duff McWilliam – whose work dated 1903 has been a great help to me in looking back through the McWilliam generations.

I have more on the Prof’s various McW family connections – too much to include here. I know that the Prof married twice, but that he had no offspring. I would certainly be interested to hear from anyone who has a more direct family connection. The Prof’s mother’s family are well worth a mention though.  His maternal grandparents (John and Helen Cumming) were the founders of the Cardhu distillery, and the family owned the business until selling it to the Johnny Walker company in 1893! http://www.scotchwhisky.net/distilleries/cardhu.htm

In 1889 at the age of 32, the Prof married Edith Constance Wise, from a wealthy Irish family (and the sister of Berkeley Dean Wise – very much a leading civil engineer of the time). Sadly Edith died in November 1893 at the age of just 33 – having contracted malaria just two months earlier while on a trip with her husband. It is understood that she had stayed in the Canary Islands (and malaria was very much present there then) while The Prof travelled on to South Africa before returning - on a ship which was travelling from Bombay to Southampton. The Cults pharmacy records show how the Prof was prescribing medication for his sick wife, but they must both have recognised that her condition was incurable in those days. It goes without saying that this must have been a very sad period. In 1897 the Prof moved from their “Wayside” home in Cults to a new home albeit just a few hundred yards away at Inverdee. In 1898 he was married for a second time, to Florence Edith Thomas from Wrexham in North Wales.

The Prof died of heart failure in January 1937, in a nursing home at 35 Drumsheugh Gardens in Edinburgh. I had to do a double take when I first saw this information – because this is exactly the building where I was born just over 10 years later!

To reinforce the message that the Prof was a man of distinction, the National Portrait Gallery in London have two photographic portraits of him, and I am pleased to have managed to obtain copies. At the time of writing I don’t have exact dates for these, but I suspect that the overcoat picture shows him at maybe in his mid 50s (so approx 1912) and the studio picture is maybe in his later 60s (approx 1925).

Finally this entry would not be complete without a big word of thanks to T and A for their help!
And a postscript is that the Prof now has his own Wikipedia entry - here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Alexander_MacWilliam