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THE name Abernethy is stated
in Douglas’ “Histoiy of the Scottish Peerage,” to be “of great antiquity,”
and to “have made a considerable figure in Scotland before surnames were
used, and though it is evident that there was no peerage in the family till
Lawrence Abernethy, of Salton, was created a Lord of Parliament by King
James the Second (King of Scotland, 1436—1460, temp. Henry VI. of England)
yet historians have always looked upon them in this rank on account of the
considerable place they had among the chief barons.”
The progenitor of the
Abernethys was Orm (lay Abbot of Abernethy, in Perthshire, a.d. 596) the son
of Hugh, who flourished under Malcolm IV., several of whose charters he
witnessed, and possessed during this reign the lands of Innerloppie, in
Forfarshire, and Balbrennie, in Fife. From William Malcolm’s successor he
acquired the Manor of Abernethy, in Strathern, and from this Manor, Orm and
his son Lawrence assumed the surname of Abernethy on June 28th, 1164.
The family, one of the oldest
in Scotland, was also, according to Winten, one of the original three who
shared in the transcendent privilege of sanctuary.—
“That is ye blak Prest of
Weddale,
The Thane of Fyfe, and ye Ihryd syne,
Quhalwyre be Lord of Abbyrnethyne.”
These passages, quoted from
the above named authorities on “Peerage,” and which are but ancillary to a
complete lineage given by them in the direct line from the time of David I.,
King of Scotland, who died a.d. 1150, to the ninth Lord of Salton Alexander
Abernethy, after whose death, the names Abernethy and Fraser became merged
in one Barony, are not quoted by the author, with the intention of drawing
in outline a large tree of descent ;n rivalry to the many, who have, with
more or less success, already produced specimens, on the top branches of
which (genealogical trees having the peculiarity of growing downwards), the
name of the Conqueror is occasionally to be detected; but rather with the
object of establishing a clear title on behalf of the subject of this
biography to be called a Scotchman by descent, apart from the circumstances
of Aberdeen (the City upon the mouth of the Dee) being his native city, the
city of his boyhood, and the city to which he was destined to be recalled in
early manhood, and to reside for ten years executing his first important
work as a civil engineer. Before concluding the reference to the antiquity
of the name Abernethy, it may be allowable to pause for a moment to point
out the somewhat remarkable conservatism with which Christian names have
been preserved among members of a family, who, for a long period, perhaps
now in some instances, at an end, have continued to style themselves Whigs,
from the time that term arose in the seventeenth century, by quoting this
extract from a Charter under the Great Seal in 1468. The Charter referred to
and given at length by Douglas, and other writers on British Peerage, was
granted to William Abernethy, wit-f* the following entail :—
“First to himself and the
heirs male of his own body, which failing, to James Abernethy, then to
George, then to Archibald, his brother german, then to his cousin, John
Abernethy.”
All these names, with the
exception of Archibald, appear to have been studiously maintained for many
generations in this branch of the family, the Abernethys of Auchinacloich,
while the three last generations, as well as the present, each conta:n three
sons bearing the Christian names above given, James being the name of the
eldest son, while the father, grandfather, and great grandfather of the
celebrated surgeon John Abernethy, of the Abernethys of Croskie,
respectively, bore the Christian name John.
One family failing, in times
happily long since passed, which can, if necessary, be more easily and
clearly proved than the family lineage, was the indulgence of a disposition
to take part in clan warfare, and unfort u-nately, on the greater number of
occasions, as results plainly show, to have done so on the wrong side,
viewed from the point of success, notably in the case of joining the
Pretender’s Army in 1845-6, for which mistaken display of patriotism several
of the more responsible of their representatives justly or unjustly
forfeited their landed estates, and some of them their lives, and their
descendants in these times can but reflect on the past family history in the
plaintive lines of Lord Byron :—
“Ill starred, though brave,
did no visions foreboding
Tell you that Fate had forsaken your cause?
Ah ! were you destin’d to die at Culloden,
Victory crowned not your fall with applause.”
The great grandfather of
James Abernethy, some account of whose life and work will be found in the
pages which follow, fell at the battle of Culloden, April 16th, 1746, while
his grandfather having been deprived of his landed property removed from
Newbiggin, near the parish of Abernethy, which is situated partly in
Perthshire and partly in Fifeshire, and resided on a small estate Lochgellie
near Kirkcaldy, in the latter county. He died at a comparatively early age,
leaving a widow and four sons—James, of Ferry Hill, Aberdeen; John, a
Minister of Bolton Manse, Haddington; Robert, Steward to the Hon. Col. Ford
Belfast; and George an Engineer.
The subject of this biography
was the eldest son of the last named by his marriage with Miss Isabella
Johnston, of Nigg, near Aberdeen, daughter of Lieut. Johnston, R.N., and was
born on June 12th, 1814, in the City of Aberdeen, whither his parents had
removed a short time previously from Fifeshire, and one of his earliest
recollections was the interest with which as a child he used to watch his
father making various mechanical designs in the evenings at home, and
pulling them into the more tangible form of wood patterns in the daytime in
a workshop adjoining the house.
The whaling ships at the foot
of Marischal Street, with their oily cargoes and jaw bones of the gigantic
mammals which had furnished them, suspended from the rigging as trophies,
and perchance calculated to attract some passing observer as being a
fanciful substitute for wooden gate-posts as an entrance to his suburban
garden, were equally objects of attraction, and induced lr'm to pay frequent
visits to the then small tidal harbour in the bed of the River Dee, where an
island known as “The Inches” separated the river from the harbour on the
north side of it, and where some twenty years later he commenced his first
important work as a civil engineer, while the Links, the Braid Hill, the
“Auld Toon,” with its cathedral, and the Brig of Balgownie by the River' Don
comprised some of the selected localities for early days’ pedestrianism.
“Often I think of the
beautiful town,
That is seated by the sea,
Often in thought go up and down.
The pleasant streets of that dear old town,
And my youth comes back to me.”
But the above enumeration did
not apparently exhaust the scenes of daily rambles, for it is recorded that
on a certain occasion while wheeling a barrow in too close proximity to the
canal bank, he lost his balance and fell upon the towing path below,
breaking his right arm at the elbow, besides other minor damages. Dr.
Blaikie, who had formerly been an army surgeon, carefully set the fractured
limb, but the bandages were released prematurely, resulting in a false joint
;n the elbow, and the right arm considerably longer than the left. The
accident, however, had its fortunate effects as well, for it tended to an
increase of strength in the limb, and he used to remark, “I found it
advantageous in my after school-day combats.”
Of the citizens resident in
Aberdeen before the year 1823 he has recorded in writing his recollection of
Mr. and Mrs. Milne, whose school in King Street, he attended: James
Davidson, a thread manufacturer, who resided at a house situated at the end
of a passage leading from North Street to King Street, to whose
grandchildren’s parties he was at times invited, and who he met some years
later on the point of emigrating to the United States, broken in fortune,
but not in spirit; and a Mr. Morgan, a retired West Indian planter, who
lived a short distance out of the city, and who kept what is popularly
termed an open house, at which one of his chief amusements was to invite
certain of the hardier headed and better seasoned citizens to partake of rum
punch in the evenings, with the result that his guests were often permitted
to depart homewards in the “sma’ hours” with indistinct topographical ideas
as to the direction in which their respective houses lay.
At the age of nine, however,
a complete change of scene with entirely new associations was in store, in
consequence of his father having obtained the post of manager in the Iron
Works of Mr. Josiah John Guest at Dowlais in Glamorganshire, and in the
summer of 1823 he embarked with his parents on a steamboat, named the
Velocity, which, with a sister ship, the Brilliant, plied on alternate
sailing days between Aberdeen and Leith on a voyage to the latter port,
thence the long coach journey was commenced, the route taken being via
Carlisle and Preston to Liverpool, where the Mersey was crossed in a rowing
boat to Birkenhead, on the Cheshire side, at that time little more than a
village, and thence again by coach via Chester and Hereford to Dowlais. A
lasting impression was produced on the boy’s mind by the sight of the long
extent of apple orchards through which the coach passed in the county of
Hereford, and which were laden with fruit at the time, and another equally
permanent, though of an entirely different kind, by the utter astonishment
at seeing from his bedroom window upon arrival at Dowlais the roaring blast
furnaces and half naked forms of the puddlers dragging the red hot bars from
the ovens.
Arrived at Dowlais his
parents settled in a cottage at a short distance from the foundry, and
attention was again paid to renewing the schooling which had been
interrupted by the change of home. An old soldier, named Shaw, residing at a
convenient distance, and who kept what he was pleased to style, on a
signboard in front of his house, an “Academy,” was selected as a suitable
teacher. This “academician” was an advocate for strict discipline which he
maintained through the agency of a long slender pole resembling a
fishing-rod, suspended in readiness for use on hooks behind his chair, and
by means of which he was enabled, without the effort of rising, to
administer a corrective on the cranium of any desultory pupil within the
room, an act (it was remembered) of frequent repetition during the time
allotted for school hours.
The road to and from the
academy lay through a prettily-wooded glen, at the bottom of which ran a
clear stream, in the deeper parts of which the boys used to bathe and learn
to swim, but upon a visit to the spot forty years later, all traces of glen
and stream had disappeared and the site was found to be filled up with
mounds of ashes and refuse from the adjoining iron works.
After a stay of some three
years at Dowlais, the acceptance by his father of a more remunerative post
as manager of a foundry in Southwark, necessitated another family removal to
London. Bristol was reached by steamer, and thence on the following day,
seats were taken on the Regulator coach for the metropolis; but on this
particular journey, in turning too sharply into the yard of the Swan Inn, at
Newbury, the vehicle upset, and passengers and luggage were deposited
indiscriminately and impartially on to the stone paving. George Abernethy
had the misfortune to break an arm in the fall, which involved a
postponement of the remainder of the journey for a fortnight, at the end of
which time the travellers reached their destination at nightfall, stooping
their heads under the archway leading to the courtyard of the Belle Sauvage,
Ludgate Hill.
The locality selected for a
residence was on the Surrey side of the river, convenient to the works, and
equally eligible from the boy’s point of view as being within easy range of
the menagerie at Exeter Change and the Tower of London, at the former of
which the elephant Chunee was held in as high esteem by the rising
generation as Jumbo, half a century later at the Zoo. He could clearly
recall visits to Old London Bridge and watching the wherries shooting the
falls between its numerous piers which remained in the river while the new
bridge was being built and long after the superstructure had been removed,
and witnessed the funeral procession of the Duke of York, brother of King
George IV., from the window of a surgeon’s room in Knightsbridge Barracks,
on its way from St. James’s Palace to Frogmore, on the morning of January
20th, 1827. |
