Glass Remembered … James Duncan Gartly

James Duncan Gartly (b. Wrightstone, Glass 1885 – d. Huntly 10th, January, 1973)

 I am afraid that I have very little to say about James or ‘Jim’ although I am sure he, himself, must have had some story to tell.  He was the oldest brother but, according to what I heard, had a rather impulsive nature, and, while a policeman in Liverpool, had gone to see friends, from his home area, off to America.  One suggested he come too and, on a whim, he did.  That was the last heard of Jim for years, if not a decade.
His mother, Elizabeth, did not know if he was alive or dead until one day he was on the doorstep in Huntly with the words ‘I’m back’.  My mother, her grannie, Elizabeth, and her aunt Bella had, by the 1930s moved to a house ‘Heathcot’, 13, East Park Street, Huntly.
In this photograph jim at heathcotJim is taking a break from tending the garden at ‘Heathco’t, which he did in the early 1940s.  I have only two memories of him, a very hazy one of him wheeling me, as a toddler, about the garden in a barrow, which I greatly enjoyed, and one of visiting him in Scott’s Hospital, Huntly in the early 1970s shortly before he died on the 10th of January, 1973.
He is buried in Glass Churchyard.
(To return to the James and Elizabeth Gartly Main page click here )

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